If you’re one of eight thousand people lucky enough to attend PDC 2008 last week and receive the ultra-cool 160GB portable hard drive with “the goods” then I have some extra good news for you, your hard drive can also become a bootable Windows 7 install disk. The best part is that you don’t even have to delete any of the existing files on the drive since there’s about 90GB free of the 160GB drive.

This is especially handy if you’re trying to install Windows 7 on a device without a DVD drive or if you don’t have any blank DVDs to burn the ISO on.

Of course this guide also works if you have an existing portable USB hard drive that has enough free space to partition and a copy of a Windows 7 ISO, which I’m sure you can get *wink*.

Step 1: Click open the Start Menu, right click on “Computer”, “Manage”. Open the “Disk Management” tool.

Step 2: Find the USB hard drive, should be 149.05GB. Right click on the volume and click “Shrink volume”. Shrink the volume by 10000MB.

Step 3: Right click on the new unallocated volume, “New Simple Volume”, format as “FAT32”. Check “Perform quick format” unless you have time to waste.

I have been doing that for vista on my 8GB Cruzer since vista’s launch. But I didn’t know it work for USB Hardrive as well as from a separate partition. Now to think of it. We are no longer restrict to just one installation media. 10 GBs of space is more than enough to house VIsta, 7, and Server 2008 installation with each in its own folder. (whichever needed, move the installation files on to root of that partition.)

Similarly, 20 GB space can use to house both 32bit and 64bits of vista,7, and 2008 all together. Isn’t it awesome?

Thank so much Long, your solution is much more simple and easy to set up.

With the falling prices for USB Flash drives (especially the larger 8 GB size), that, combined with this trick, will make the external USB flash drive the install medium of choice for technicians (especially in enterprises with many far-flung desktops). Say that you have a half-dozen such thumb drives, with each a different color.

hey. way to go testing it out. I spent a few hours trying to get it working. I KNOW i’m missing something. What I did was copy the {current} entry and then deleted what I thought were unessessary entries, and modified the others. I have it showing up in the boot menu, but when selecting it, to start I get an error stating that the application failed to load, or something like that. this is what my menu entry looks like:

I’m Thinking that the boot loader at this time cannot recognize drive letters. (not sure) and I am having trouble finding what the GUID is for the G: to try, so what I am doing is going simple and just putting everyhing on the C:\

Regarding the bootable USB HDD issue: I must be missing something. I thoght the BIOS in PC’s are not capable of booting via USB. If it is possible I would do a claen of WIndows 7 on myMAXTOR 4 +. USB drive and run off this drive when I want experiment with Windows & beta. Help?

Well I tried every which way but this doesn’t appear to work. A build 7000 quirk? Who knows? I get as far as choosing which partition to install W7 on and then I’m told that Windows won’t install from a USB device. Yes I’ve checked my BIOS and all is good, it appears to be W7 that won’t play nicely.

So I’m trying to install Windows 7 with a USB key, and it’s not working. I can format the USB drives within Computer Management, but when I right-click on the partition, “Mark partition as active” is dimmed and unselectable.

If I format and copy over a Win7 install partition as given above on my 8 gb data traveler 100, don’t I need to copy over a boot sector command to get it to boot as first device? Or is copying as a mounted device placing the boot sector where it is needed? Other less inventive tutorials all require running diskpart commands on boot sector files.

Can I do all of this to it’s own primary partition on the USB stick, then create another non-bootable data partition to carry my apps and files around?

Geek Squad tells me I can put multiple bootable O.S. on the same stick and use a boot manager to select the one to boot from. However I cannot imagine wanting anything except Win7 all-sku’s for the foreseeable future, and so having just that in its’ bootable partition and my apps/files in a data partition would make me the perfect travel stick.

I need to say this I’M IN TROUBLE !! Well, I copied all the files to my USB HDD and deleted the Image file. I tried to boot with the USB HDD but it did not boot up and I’m stuck. I used Nero to create an Image but my friend told me it needs to be an exact same image that I got from Microsoft before I deleted it. HOW CAN I CONVERT THE LOOSE FILES BACK INTO THE SAME BOOTABLE IMAGE SO I CAN BURN IT ON A DVD?

U cant buddy, While copyind there is something called boot image which is not sopied, so the nero or any other software needs that image to make the disk bootable. U cud have used Barts BBIE(Barts Boot Image Extractor to get the image). U need to download the iso again.

I bought an adapter that would allow one of my Hard Drives to be accessed via USB. I bought one and it works great, but I decided to install Windows 7 Ultimate build 7068 and my computer said that it could not install a fresh copy of Win 7 unto a USB device.

Okay, if that was the problem I decided to remove my CD RW drive and connect the hard drive instead. I then connected the CD-RW drive to the USB adapter and it worked perfectly. I was able to use the CD drive to install onto the hard drive.

I then decided that I didnt want to have my computer looking like a disassembled piece of junk, so I thought, “Hey, why not reconnect everything how it was, and just boot up Windows 7 from USB”.

I put the computer back together nicely, but upon boot options it gave me 2 options:

Vista/Longhorn
Windows 7

So I chose Windows 7 only to have the computer reboot. Am I doing something wrong? Did I mess up the Main Boot Record since Windows 7 was installed from IDE instead of being connected from USB?

Is there a way to get my computer to allow me to boot up without the restart?

Let me know if anyone has any ideas or needs any more relevant information.

@curtis
Windows 7 will NOT boot from an usb device, windows is very annoying that way.
You can boot the installdisk from USB (very usefull for netbooks without an cd/dvd drive)
but that has been possible for a long time via the computers bios (depending on mainboard)

More then a decade ago there were Operating Systems you could install to a harddrive plug that one in another computer and it would work (slightly depending on supported hardware offcourse)
Windows tries to repair itself by numerous rebooting and foreced reactivation but it still remains an annoying pOS

I just tried this with Win 7 RC1 to a USB hard drive. Win 7 does not allow installation of the OS to a USB hard drive. You can install the OS to non-USB drives from installation files contained on a USB flash/hard drive, but just can’t install the OS to a USB drive and run off that drive. The installation files run fine, Win7/M$ just doesn’t allow it.

I try to install Windows 7 (RC1) on my external USB HDD (Seagate Free Agent). When I select the USB HDD partitions, the installation gives an error message saying that, not able to find the driver. So I routed the driver path for the USB mass storage. After it gives another error message saying that, windows can’t install on USB or IEEE 1394 devices…

This tutorial is for using USB drive as an INSTALLER for Win7. I use my USB flash to install so haven’t tried it on larger drive, but I know that MS has blocked the installation of the full Win7 OS onto any USB device.

I went through all the steps (used a Vista machine to shrink the partition, but have an XP 32bit OS myself), but I just can’t mark the partition as active. It’s not currently active, though the main partition is marked active.

FYI, Paul, you have to shrink volume using vista. XP doesn’t have that option 🙂 Same with the ‘simple drive’ option. I had to create a extended partition, and then create a logical drive to format it. Not sure if it will work, but worth a shot.

I have followed this guide step by step completely, missed nothing. I even tried formating a partition using windows vista. But it still won’t boot from my USB HDD. Says NTLDR is missing, which is what it says when I forget to connect my hard drive with windows on it sometimes.

After no success with the built in partitioner (Win7), I used a 3rd party option (ESEAUS Partition Manager) to get the job done. For the NTLDR is missing error, you need to run bootsect from the win7 DVD (in the /boot dir) to get it working. Here’s the details: http://kmwoley.com/blog/?p=345. This really came in handy, cause my new machine hasn’t got a DVD drive. 🙂

I can’t shrink the volume of my wd portable hard drive – the option isnt avaialble. and if i go ahead and format i will those the lot right? i was well chiffed when i found this as all i want to do is boot from my wd portable hard drive eeeeek

will this mean that my 7 OS is in my External Hard Drive and i can boot my PC with my External as primary?
what does it mean when you partition a 10 G Volume? is it for the 7 OS or it’s just for the ISO?

I just found this tool which automates the whole process of creating a bootable Windows 7 flash disk. Unlike these other methods it also runs under Windows XP as well. Check it out… http://firesage.com/bootsage

okay i tried doing this on vista since i jst wanted to restore my laptop but it doesnt seem to work any tips for vista users coz i followed your guideline to the letter and my laptop is jst black for at least 10 minutes so i restart it… please help..

SOLVED! Issue with invalid ISO loading in windows 7 usb/dvd download tool can be solved by first, installing POWERISO and register it so that you can modify the properties of the ISO file you want to load on your USB flash drive, once you have done it, open your Windows 7 ISO with POWERISO, from file go to image properties, check the UDF box then save the ISO file by replacing the original file or saving as your desired file name. Please note that if you were not able to register the POWER ISO, you will not be able to make any changes with the Original ISO you are trying to modify. From the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool, browse and choose your modified ISO file then it should start loading to your USB drive.

Just found an amazing easy tool to do this. Don’t even have to format or shrink the drive “wintobootic.com”
Support ISO, DVD or Folder as boot disk source. Basically it will flash the bootloader or bootsector from source onto your flash or portable usb drive, then copy the source over.

I have a 500GB Western Digital portable usb drive. I reserved a 100GB partition (primary, active, drive letter L for reference) for storing all kind of Windows iso in a folder called @_Windows_ISO. I have each windows iso version extracted onto a separate folder (name with @ character in front to avoid mistake with regular folder). If I want to install Win Vista for example, I move all the files & folder inside @_Windows_Vista_x86_x64_AIO to L:\ then plug it in PC need installation-> It just works.
When I need install Windows 7 Home premium, I move all the files & folder not labeled @ back to its previous folder Vista, then same thing move content from @_Windows_7_Home_Premium out to L:

One thing I found out about the tool is that no formating is needed. In my case I already have all that folders set up beforehand, then I use the tool to flash bootloader and one Windows 7 iso as source to make the USB drive bootable.